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L
Larry the O
Participating Frequently
June 17, 2023
Question

XHTML to PDF: internal links raise security warning

  • June 17, 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 1170 views

I am trying to convert an XHTML/CSS file to PDF. I would have thought that an easy thing to do, but i guess nothing is easy. Acrobat does not seem able to open an XHTML file, as near as I can tell. I can open it in a browser and then print it to a pdf, but when I do, all of the internal links (i.e. links to anchors in the XHTML) raise a security warning saying that it can't find the file and giving the file URL. (Again, these are entirely INTERNAL links.)

 

Aside from this issue, conversion to pdf by printing from the browser works fine. How can I fix this bizarre problem?

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    2 replies

    L
    Larry the OAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    June 18, 2023

    I think I fixed it, and it is one of the strangest bugs I have ever seen.

    I realized that some of the Table of Contents links were working and others were not. Hovering over the TOC links in the PDF, I found that a number of the TOC links were missing the hashtag (#). I opened an older version of the XHTML document from about four days ago, and all of the links had hashtags and all worked, but when I looked at the current version, those hashtags were missing. Now, I've done nothing to change the TOC for at least a couple of weeks, so I'm not sure how only some of those hashtags disappeared, but that's not even the weirdest part.

    When I fixed the links in the TOC and added the hashtags back, all of the other internal links (which had the hashtags but weren't working) suddenly started working. All that I can figure is that the missing hashtags invalidated relative links in the XHTML, breaking all of the internal links, which, of course, were relative, as opposed to the external links, which were absolute. I dunno, doesn't really sound logical, but I'm not sure how else to explain it.

    I need to work with the document a little more to feel certain, but I just clicked through the entire TOC and then walked through the document and clicked internal links as I found them and everything seems to be working.

    Whoa!

    T
    Test Screen Name
    Legend
    June 17, 2023

    Are the internal links HREF=".... URL of file ... #anchor" or just HREF="#anchor"?

      L
      Larry the OAuthor
      Participating Frequently
      June 17, 2023

      They are the latter: #anchor. They have to be, because this file is a manual that will get distributed, so there is no way to know what the full URL will be. Or is there?

       

      I discovered that I could go through each and every internal link, delete it as a URL, add a Destination, then add a link to it. If I have no other choice, I guess I have to do that, but it sure seem a pretty bare-knuckles way to go about things.

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